Odd, isn't it, that the week that politicians are explaining to Lord Justice Leveson how, when it came to relations with the media, they were victims more than active agents should begin with the Sun revealing that a couple of months ago David Cameron left his eight-year-old daughter Nancy at the Chequers local, the Plough. This may be a story that interests the public – how Everyman is that, to get in a muddle about where the kids are – but it is not of any obvious public interest except, perhaps, for what it might say about the attentiveness of the prime minister's security detail (absolutely nothing, says Downing Street).

Meanwhile, at the Leveson inquiry, Cameron's predecessor, Gordon Brown, is denouncing the media in general, and Rupert Murdoch in particular, for serially distorting the public's priorities by pursuing the personal over the political. Most bitterly, he angrily denied the Sun's claim that he or his wife Sarah had in any way authorised the story revealing that their baby son had cystic fibrosis. Another story notably not in the public interest.

The significance of both stories (although not necessarily any justification for reporting them) is the way they play to popular perceptions. They get written because they endorse the image. Brown's political persona – control freak and ruthless manipulator – was underlined by every aspect of the Sun story. Seemingly written in tones of concerned sympathy, in effect – and this is truly a shocking claim – it implied he was prepared to trade on his son's devastating condition in order to soften up public opinion. Crikey, would it be possible to be more ruthlessly manipulative than that?

Cameron, meanwhile, is said to regard relaxing as a key part of his job of running the country in the midst of the most terrifying recession in living memory. Today we learn he is so relaxed he doesn't count his kids in and out of the pub. The Sun story ticks every box on the chillax scale. Lunches in pub. With friends. Lets the older children go off alone. Mislays one of them. Hasn't every parent been there? Crikey, what astonishingly normal behaviour.

It's not chance of course that both stories involve children. Politicians' offspring are seen as abiding proof that they remain in contact with the world the rest of us inhabit. How they behave towards their families is taken as some kind of irrefutable character reference. Attempts by politicians to exploit this fundamental truth of public life are rigorously policed (just remember the disastrous boomerang of John Major's 1990s back to basics). But it is in the nature of the unbalanced relationship between media and politicians that it seems quite acceptable for us to do the exploiting for them.

And the more remote politicians seem, the less the voters care about what they do. And the less the voters care, the harder we in the media try to find something that might titillate the public appetite. And the more politicians are surely tempted to play the family card. Maybe, in the end, the number of stories about politicians' children is in inverse proportion to the politicians' ability to reach out in any other way.